Grind in Rewind 2007

The end of the year countdown list is an institution every bit as sacred as the one second song. So we humbly plowed through the ridiculously tall stack of crap we bought this year to sift out the five best records of 2007.
We look back on 2007 as a year of that presaged the advent of acoustic grind, the continued dominance of the Swedes and cinematic beatdowns, leaving us with the distinct sensation of insects burrowing under our skin. And we liked it.

5. The Locust
New Erections
Epitaph
One for the message board haters.
The worlds have warred, our new insect overlords have pillaged and gone and The Locust drone Justin Pearson is left to wonder whether there is any point in rebuilding. New Erections' 23 minutes are laced with enough paranoia and dystopia to fuel the second coming of Phillip K. Dick.
Returning from the meandering wtf moment that was 2005’s Safety Second, Body Last, The Locust have inched upped the bpm quotient once again but haven’t forgotten the lessons of slightly longer songs with a few slower moments tossed in to create their most dynamic and expansive record to date.
Alex Newport, in his third outing as the band’s producer, wrings a tight performance out of the spastic crew in rubber bug suits. The songs careen from blastbeat fueled freakouts laced with their trademark keyboard squonk to slowly blipping bits of frazzled computer sludge. The longer songs give Pearson a more expansive palette upon which to expound his post-apocalypse now meanderings.
Almost no band has been as divisive in their career as The Locust and New Erections won’t be winning any converts/defectors from either camp, but for those with a taste for the adventurous, the hardcore arthropods have swarmed back with their finest outing.

4. Graf Orlock
Destination Time Tomorrow
Level Plane
Load up Hot Fuzz on mute and fire off this burning little EP. These marauding cinophiles make a better soundtrack for Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s hilarious action film send up than even Robert Rodriguez’s climactic score.
Bad action movie samples abound, more bad action movie dialog serves in lieu of lyrics and it’s all soldered together with well executed Pig Destroyer-ish grind and a soupcon of '80s thrash.
But let’s be honest here, one of the reasons this EP made the cut is because of the absolutely stunning artwork. Instead of a jewel case, the CD is lovingly cradled by face hugger from the Alien series and wrapped in a “Uline state shield bag” that warns “Handling requires caution.” It’s the best packaging gag since HeWhoCorrupts packed the Microeconomics album in a wallet complete with credit cards and an itemized business lunch receipt.

3. Sayyadina
Mourning the Unknown
Sound Pollution
Yes Sayyadina are Swedish. Yes they sound a little like Nasum. No that doesn’t mean Mieszko Talarcyk is coming back.
But in a countdown full of contenders playing fast and loose with grind’s established ground rules, we take a moment to remind everyone that when executed well with slashing production and catchy songs, there’s nothing wrong with tradition.
Bringing in some of the hardcore vibe from his side project, Victims, Andreas Ericksson leads his cohorts through 21 tracks of rampaging grind on Mourning the Unknown that delve deep into the band’s psyche without having to bring in a shrink. They tackle isolation, loneliness and depression in a satisfyingly non-emo way.
Eriksson’s production gives the songs a heft and a bite, letting each instrument stake out its spot on the killing floor. Jon Linqvist’s high/low vocal tradeoffs with Eriksson also give each song a dynamism and personality.
Sayyadina have certainly studied at the feet of Nasum (Eriksson played bass on Shift), and the trio has absorbed those lessons well. They are on the verge of creating their own space in the crowded Swedish grind scene and are definitely a band to watch moving forward.

2. Total Fucking Destruction
Zen and the Art of Total Fucking Destruction
Translation Loss
I know it’s only acoustic grind, but I like it.
No we had never heard of it prior to 2007 either, but that’s just part of what makes Rich Hoak a metal visionary.
The former Brutal Truth drum basher and his crack A-Team were back on their second outing in 2007, a three part performance art soap opera that defied everyone’s expectations.
On Zen and the Art... TFD unleashed 10 new tracks of stream of consciousness grind, particularly standouts “Mad Pig Disease” and “We are all Elvis Now.” As a bonus the multimedia disc also includes footage of a 10-song live set showing the band in their natural habitat. But it’s the four song acoustic diversion bookended by those two sections that surely had many a grindcore tongue wagging this year.
The subdued take on TFD standards “Kill the Jocks and Eat their Brains” and “Bio-Satanic Terrorist Attack” give those songs a new depth and texture beyond the original versions.
For a band that has posited itself as cultural terrorists, they deftly pulled off a unexpected bit of musical legerdemain and subverted grindcore itself.


In any other year, that accomplishment would have warranted top of the list honors, but as Connor MacLeod knows all too well, there can be only one… (I know that would have been a slightly less lame reference had Graf Orlock been just a teensy bit better.) But keep reading....

Pearls from Swine: Pig Destroyer unleash a beast of an album

“She hung herself from an overpass down in McClean where the old trees loom…”
Welcome to Pig Destroyer’s Northern Virginia, a devastating tour through the ‘burbs of our nation’s capital and inarguably the best thing to cough blood on grindcore’s shoes all year.
Phantom Limb, the band’s third album for Relapse, crashed onto the scene like a grinding DUI hit and run, the sonic equivalent of rush hour traffic careening through the Mixing Bowl.
The only album in the metal family that came close to Phantom Limb’s caustic beatdown this year was Neurosis’ latest epic. While J.R. Hayes and company needed half the time it took noisecore’s elder statesmen to reach the pinnacle, the emotional catharsis was the same. Sort of like the ”you take the high road/I’ll take the low road” pairing of 2007 metal.
Obviously, we weren’t the only ones to enjoy Mr. Hayes’ wild ride through a serial killer’s diary.
But according to Blake Harrison, PXDX’s resident FNG/soundscape maestro, the band didn’t realize what kind of beast they had on their hands until the reviews started rolling in.
“Not really, we just kinda wanted to slim everything down from Terrifyer and make a leaner, meaner metal record with a little less art,” he said.
The album is certainly meaner from John Baizley’s (of Savannah sludge horde Baroness) horrifically psychedelic artwork to Scott Hull’s scalpel riffs and skull-scraping production work.“The writing was a lot more streamlined and the sound and the songs seem a lot less arty in general,” Harrison said. “I don't know if it was a matter of restraint, but more of the idea of a leaner meaner record.”
Juggling narcogrinders Agoraphobic Nosebleed, a hush-hush fed job, working as one of metal’s most in-demand producers and a growing family, guitarist/songwriter Hull is a busy dude. That left the band little time to fuck around when they have to write and record their latest masterpiece.
“Scott pretty much came in with songs done. There was input from everyone else, but the skeletons were there,” Harrison said. “So it wasn't like we were jamming and staring at him to come up with a part when a song wasn't done. It also made the recording process MUCH easier.”
For those of us lucky enough to be living in smelling distance of the cesspool on the Potomac, Phantom Limb is littered with references to local spots. On J.R.’s guided tour of Northern Virginia we get to see corpses piled along the Potomac, girls in Slayer jackets hanging from McClean overpasses and the kind of rich, upwardly mobile young douchebags this area attracts like flies on shit doing their primitive mating dance along the Duke Street waterfront in Alexandria in the shadow of the notoriously congested Wilson Bridge.

“J.R. just writes what he feels,” Harrison said. “Living in the area we live in, it has an affect on him.”
Here’s hoping Hayes never invests in a good shrink. But more intriguing moving forward will be watching the Destroyers fully incorporate Harrison into their already tight little unit.
Open minded grinders probably have visions of the devastating Merzbow/Discordance Axis collaboration dancing in their heads, but Harrison said he’s still working through PXDX’s back catalogue and figuring out his role during the band’s scant live appearances.
“I do my best. Now we have a little more time to work on stuff. I'm going to be doing more of a compositional thing live, but again, we'll see how it goes.”

G&P review: Khann

Khann
Tofutopia
Blackmarket Activities
KHAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN!
This intriguing but alternately infuriating slab o' metal is enough to send any listener into Shatnerian paroxysms.
Former Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus vocalist Joshua Vitale returns from that band’s premature demise with Khann on debut Tofutopia.
Instead of BitGotA’s spazzy grind, these veggie heads emulate the sludge and grind smoothie of another gone-too-soon member of the metal family, Ohio’s Rune.
This Khann’s wrath throws Neurosis heft and Isis throb into a blender with crunchy Napalm Death, walking the middle course between knuckle dragging sludge and meth-ed out metal.
The grind to sludge and back slide of “Quarantined” and follow up track “Silver Mouth” show a band confident in its use of dynamics.
Clear picked notes slash through the opening of the appropriately titled “Squall,” one of the album’s clear highlights. The burly maelstrom that follows as Vitale wails “I am a powerless waste” is the album’s clear emotional peak.
But the young band does stumble occasionally as well.
Despite its stonerrific coda, overlong two part album centerpiece, “Volcanic Lungs” drags just when the album should be peaking, particularly during the 6 minute-plus first half. And closer “The Lone Hum,” a torrent of electric squeals and squonks is overlong at more than 8 minutes followed by a handful of untitled tracks with pointless noise and studio fuckery.
Tofutopia could stand to lose the soy filler. But there is a killer half an hour album buried beneath the unnecessary detours, and in the hands of a ruthless editor, this could have been one of the best releases of the year. Despite the rough edges, Khann’s debut has marked them as a band to watch.

The Dirty (Baker's) Dozen 9: Siege

Siege
Drop Dead
Originally self released (reissued by Relapse, Deep Six and Deranged)
1984
If you’ve ever wondered whose power Napalm Death was besieging, look no further.
The band may never have hit blastbeat velocities, but every other element of what would become grind was already in this Boston quartet’s arsenal.
Though the band’s entire discography spans a scant nine songs that can be enjoyed in half the time of your standard sitcom, Siege’s influence is incalculable.
Originally released in the Orwellian year 1984, Drop Dead seethes with the frustration and paranoia born of Soviet and American tensions. Song (“Sad but True”) after song (“Cold War”) after song “Armageddon”) rails against the two nation’s seeming glee in bringing the world to the brink of mutually assured destruction in stabbing 60 second blasts of hardcore noise. Racism (“Life of Hate”), world hunger (“Starvation”) and mindless conformity (duh, “Conform”) get a thoroughly scathing rundown as well.
From the blunt lyrics to the cro-magnon music and Kevin Mahoney’s distinctive yelp, Siege was never a subtle proposition. But in the face of abject stupidity, it seemed the only approach.
Medlied by Anal Cunt, whose Seth Putnam auditioned for a reformed lineup in 1992, and covered by Napalm Death, Siege set the standard for the full steam ahead aggression that would become grindcore.

Carcass Word of the Day Calendar: Dec. 16, 2007

What happens to you after you die? The question has plagued mankind since our ancestors began roaming the Serengetti about 50,000 years, eking out a haphazard existence. Luckily for enlightened modern sophisticates such as us, the theologians in Carcass have the answer for you: you rot and turn into goo.
The high priests of goregrind expound upon life’s aftermath in Symphony of Sickness’ “Cadaveric Incubator of Endo-parasites.” So once again, we crack open ye olde medical dictionary.

ulcerous – adj. afflicted with ulcers
saponify – v. to convert fat into soap using an alkali
rennin – n. a coagulating enzyme in a calf’s stomach used to curdle milk during the cheese making process
autolysis – n. the breakdown of plant or animal tissues by enzymes contained in the affected tissues, self-digestion

"The inset of rigor mortis, ulcerous corruption and decay
Saponified fats lather as soap as you slowly eat yourself away
Organs savaged by rotten enzymes, rennin and rancorous cysts
A festering abcess immersed in ravenous autolysis…."

G&P review: Total Fucking Destruction

Total Fucking Destruction
Zen and the Art of Total Fucking Destruction
Translation Loss
Don’t look now but somebody’s Violent Femmes is showing like a blister in the sun.
Yes TFD grind like motherfuckers through the first 10 new tracks of their latest disc, Zen and the Art of Total Fucking Destruction. And yes the video section lets you watch the cephalopodic Rich Hoak flail about his kit while screaming out the lyrics to the feel good classic “Kills the Jocks and Eat their Brains.”
But it’s going to be the subdued, stripped down four song acoustic middle section that’s going to start the most conversations and likely turn off grind purists. Yes, the acoustic version of the aforementioned “Kill the Jocks” sounds like an outtake from the first Violent Femmes album, but that’s exactly what makes these performance art terrorists so very interesting.
Proving he didn’t have his fill of the weird during his Brutal Truth tenure, Hoak and his co-conspirators have consistently pushed grind’s humble limits time and time again. Like John Zorn discovering blastbeats 20 years ago, Hoak et al help make the case for grind as art with 20 second blasts of reductio ad absurdum noise and stream of consciousness lyrical dribblings.
Zen’s 10 new tracks, especially standout “Mad Pig Disease,” naturally grind and thrash their way through the desolate America’s fractured mediascape at the start of the 21st Century. The grindcore carnival is capped with video of a nine song live set. We’ll just ignore the copyright warning that kicks of the video and assume that was a label call and not representative of a band that bills itself as subversive artists.
TFD is clearly onto something with this raucous, expectation defying tour de force, and this is clearly one of the grind highlights of 2007.

G&P review: Tusk

Tusk
The Resisting Dreamer
Tortuga
More than two years after the mindfuck camping trip nightmare that was Tree of No Return, the three-quarters of Pelican that comprise Tusk return with a revamped line up and a revised sound.
Anyone looking for another round of Tree’s Pig Destroyer/Neurosis cage match sound should just stop reading now. With nary a blastbeat in sight, The Resisting Dreamer brings in a more pronounced influence from the band members’ other project. Recorded during sessions for Pelican’s breakout The Fire in our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, Tusk’s four new tracks swim in the sludge the other band has steadily been shedding in favor of a leaner sound.
Instead it’s The Resisting Dreamer that boasts the same beefy bottom end that made early Pelican and fellow Tortugans 5ive so enjoyable.
“The Everlasting Taste of Disguise” opens like a Jesu outtake before greasily sliding into jarring nightmare territory where spiky, corkscrewing guitar riffs stab at you like the flock of marauding crows in The Birds.
Final instrumental cut “The Lewdness and Frenzy of Surrender,” weighing in at a hefty 16 minutes, could easily serve as a companion piece to the recent Sunn O))) and Boris collaboration album.
The dominant lyrical theme is “ruin,” album as Young Widows’ Even Patterson and Toby Driver of Kayo Dot (standing in for MIA vocalist Jody Minnoch) expounding on crumbling realities literal and figurative.
Though it’s a solid and enjoyable sludge album, the new direction just makes Tusk feels redundant. If this is the band’s future and not an artistic blip, they might as well recruit Bryan Herweg for the next outing and call it what it really is: a throwback Pelican album that experiments with vocals. It would probably sell twice as many copies that way.